uncertainty

If you cannot see the forest for the trees, it doesn’t mean you can’t see at all – you just lack the focus on what’s essential. It’s just that you cannot zoom in and cut out all those impressions, which should not be taken into account.

This happens a lot, for instance, when you scan the shelves in a store, to find the appropriate offer – in most cases, you walk out without buying anything: overload leads to paralysis, too much information hampers recognition of the essential – it makes you uncertain.

Often, this is exactly what happens when developing all those products that end up on these shelves: also, here, one often cannot see the forest for the trees.

Since today, technology has made almost everything possible, manufacturers are eager to offer their achievements to their customers. To clean up this offer, the designers and marketers take a ‘less is more’ approach in order to focus on the essentials. They have learned to do this in a methodical way: a design process starts with research, which is then synthesized into insights, which form the basis for concept development, which eventually leads to new products and services… And as so often, the problem starts right there, with the first step: in the research.

A fundamental part of the research activity for new product development is observation: through observation, all issues that a consumer may face during a buying or use experience are recorded. Next to this, you record emerging and active trends and how far they influence the marketplace, fashion, and consumers. Furthermore, you observe your competitors and how they respond to these trends and issues. And as so often, there was a lot that could be observed; it’s crucial to focus on the essential.

If you conduct this research like a scientist, in a lab, you are faced with a big problem: the lack of ‘reality’. Observing people in a lab environment and how they use products and services is very insightful for developers and engineers, and helps them improve the design. But these observations do not reveal whether consumers actually will buy and use the design – this remains uncertain. This is because lab users and focus groups are not real users – here, the ‘reality’ is distorted.

But if you start to ‘secretly’ observe consumers, in their natural habitat, so to speak, it can easily happen that the observation becomes blurry and does not deliver the insights you are looking for. Why? Well, as soon as you want to know why the consumer is doing this or that, and you start asking him to verify your assumptions, you will influence him right away, and with that, the outcome of the observation and further analysis: all becomes uncertain again.

The scientist has a corresponding law for such a phenomenon: the uncertainty principle!

In short, this states that there is a fundamental limit on the accuracy with which certain pairs of physical properties can be known simultaneously. In other words, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known. An example? If you observe a cyclist coming down a street, you have two ‘properties’: if you focus on the cyclist, you’ll find out who he is and what bike he uses, but how fast he’s going and what’s around him remain uncertain. To clarify the latter, you have to focus on the surroundings and observe the cyclist moving, but then he becomes blurry and ‘uncertain’.

What Heisenberg’s principle teaches us is that we all have to live with uncertainty, and that, because of this, we have to interpret what we observe: one could say that we need a form of empathy to gain insight from an observation, because what seems to be is not how it really is! You have to imagine how these two ‘properties’ form a complete picture.

For developers and designers, this means that observation can merely be a starting point to achieve insight; it can never be used as a fact: it always needs interpretation of what has been observed and empathy with users and consumers to what their real requirements might be – it needs a design thinking. This mindset is the basis for finding new insights and creating solutions, which people really need and use. Asking people right away is not helpful in this, as we know – they are uncertain by law.

That’s why the acceptance of a new, insightful solution depends on whether consumers can overcome their uncertainty and understand what this solution does for them. And this is not so easy in a world where, according to physical law, all remains uncertain. Luckily, there are ways to get clarity amid uncertainty: consumers by following their gut feeling, and businesses by applying design thinking!